I think the issues I relate here will be of interest to many developers planning to develop for Confluence, so I've placed it in the open here to help them...

Dear Jonathan

Thanks for taking the time to read my letter about my development plans related to Confluence. E.K. suggested I contact you about some questions I have. I thought I might start with a bit of introduction, so you can understand the context of what I'd like to develop and the questions that I have.

My experience with wiki

I have been developing and deploying wiki sites and wiki software since for about 7 years. I started with a copy Usemod perl wiki, and have spent years hacking cool new features into at wiki sites for myself and clients, such as http://www.chat11.com, http://www.bookax.com, http://www.searchingforbigfoot.com I've also developed some wiki softwares from scratch, such as the http://www.hivewiki.com system which is a wiki farm, and also used to run a 4,000,000+ page wiki.... Other people have noticed the size of some of my other wikis, and added them to the wikipedia page about the largest non-wikimedia wikis in existence. I have over 25 years software development experience, so wiki is fun on many levels of creating content, and tweaking the software that runs the wikis.

Confluence is really great, makes me wonder whether I should cancel further development on my own wiki software

I have been impressed with Confluence. It puts me into a deep quandary about whether to continue my own wiki development, or to refocus on using Confluence. If I can find the time in the next two weeks, I'll be making some entries into the [CodeGeist] contest.

Why I started developing my own wiki software from scratch

My most recent wiki, the http://www.hivewiki.com, was created to answer a serious problem: How to serve the contents for hundreds (or more) wikis out of a single central installation. I own over 500 domain names, and had rolled out Usemod wiki installations on at least 100 of them before I realized it was getting too difficult to keep all the configurations in sync, and to roll out upgrades to all of them. I also wanted to offer easy creation of wikis to the public as subdomains on many of the domains I own, ala pbwiki.com So I developed hivewiki from the ground up as a multi-domain wiki farm, and it is working successfully. I've tested it with serving wiki sites over 4,000,000 pages, and I'd ported several dozen of my wikis into it. I've also used it as a testbed to develop some interesting wiki extensions.

Enterprise support of the base wiki is difficult, and Atlassian is doing a good job of it with Confluence

But I know that hivewiki has no where near the features of Confluence. Also supporting Confluence at a Fortune 100 company, (and dealing with the demands of enterprise level support), cause me to question if I want to get into that space. It seems like it might be better for me to switch to using Confluence as a platform, and focus my work on efforts to extend it.

How to build my extensions to Confluence

So I am looking at what would I do to Confluence to bring it up to what I need. I setup a Confluence Wiki to support the projects which I will develop as open source project: Project Planning. Please take a look to get a sense of the kinds of enhancements that Confluence needs to handle the kinds of wiki sites that I am running.

I believe that many of these projects will require much deeper integration into Confluence than is allowed in the current plugin architecture. For example supporting multiple domains (vhosting) would probably require me to change the URL rendering routines. Quota features require a plugin type that can veto events it is listening to.

I've developed a page that lists some of the specific questions I have on this: Questions About How To Develop Confluence Add-ins Other Than Plugins.

I would really appreciate your thoughts on those questions, and if anything has already been documented to address these issues.

Thanks,

• Garnet